Christie’s in London sold Claude Monet’s “‘Le bassin aux nympheas” for £40,921,250 / $80,451,178 / €51,683,539 Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale took place this evening (24 June 2008) and realised £144,440,500 / $283,970,023 / €182,428,352 – the highest ever total for an art auction held in Europe. The top lot of the auction [...]
HIS 1954 Picasso became the most expensive painting sold in Australia when it went under the hammer last night for $6.9 million. The oil on canvas, named Sylvette, depicts a 19-year-old woman in bright colours and semi-abstract, geometric forms. Sylvette was painted by Picasso when he was in his 80s and living on the Cote [...]
The first part of Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary Art at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris totaled €20,384,750, with works from French, European and American collections the majority of them fresh to the market including paintings by Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as four works from the Estate of President [...]
A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties. “Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, a Chelsea [...]
Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art on Wednesday proved to be a solid if unexciting evening. Experts there, however, pronounced it “fantastic,” as if to again reassure buyers and sellers that the art market was alive and well despite setbacks in the financial and real estate markets. As was true at Christie’s auction of [...]
You can’t help but wonder just how many of the smartly dressed people sitting night after night at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks will be serious bidders and how many will be voyeurs hoping to witness an implosion of the multibillion dollar art market. For years collectors and the [...]
The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the [...]